L6520

Low Voltage Smart Ballast Controller

Active

The L6520/1 is the first highly integrated ballast controller in the market able to drive both BJTs and MOSFETs, providing all the necessary protections to ensure the maximum reliability of the application in compliance with major safety and power consumption regulations.

By adopting BJTs switches in the application, the IC allows to replace more expensive MOSFETs, strongly reducing the system cost without compromises.

The IC represents also the best and cost effective solution to replace self oscillating solutions when the key requirement is the reliability of the ballast. The benefits are an increased MTBF and a reduction of the costs due to the return from the field.

The higher level of flexibility and integration provided allows the possibility to quickly design ballast with any kind of lamp topology/size/power, without limitations. Depending on the power of the lamp, the IC can work without PFC, with passive PFC or with active PFC. In the latter case the L6562A from STMicroelectronics is the suggested IC for the most cost effective solution.

The IC is fully programmable using only resistors and offers over current protections, choke saturation control and hard switching protection thanks to a sophisticated current control circuit (CCC). In ignition, the CCC limits both the maximum lamp voltage in case of old or broken lamp, and also the lamp current in case of inductor saturation.

When the IC is driving bipolar transistors, a variable dead time ensures the correct base discharge time avoiding cross conduction phenomena. Moreover, the IC prevents the failure due to the lamp's end of life (EOL).